How we walk with the broken speaks louder than how we sit with the great.
Grief can be a confusing place to find yourself. From my experience, I didn’t feel “prepared” for it. Yes, my late husband Ryuta died suddenly (and who can prepare for that?), but looking back I can think that perhaps I could have gotten some better tools for the inevitable grief that would enter my life. I don’t know how many of us realize how inevitable grief is and yet we continue on as we do, living our lives naively and blindly, so focused on success, uneducated about how to handle deep emotional pain. Our modern culture didn’t teach me how to handle these big emotions that would come from such a life altering loss. I learned many good things from my education, my family, my faith, such as having a strong work ethic, trying your best, not quitting, “doing good” for others. But what happens when devastating, life altering things outside of your control take away the world that you worked so hard to build? How do we navigate our way back to safety?
Mpathway was put together with this in mind of creating a pathway to navigate through the emotions, the loss and the healing in grief. In our biggest losses, the scariest part for me has been feeling lost and that the person that I was got lost in all of the losses. It is normal during these times, but I know that we don’t want to stay lost. Hopefully, this site will be helpful to you as you navigate grief or try to better understand grief to help someone you love. The M in M pathway stands for “mourning.” We need a pathway to help us during the mourning that happens when we first grieve. M pathway is also a play on words for the word “empathy”, a crucial ingredient in the process of healing. In the future, I hope to introduce some guest writers to add their personal stories and lessons so that Mpathway can become a community of grievers collaborating and helping one another out. In the meantime, I’d like to introduce myself.
My name is Somer Mercado. I live in the San Francisco bay area in California, born and raised. I’m an elementary school teacher (with a love for helping our next generation and teaching some of my favorite subjects like writing and SEL), mother to two boys now ages 12 and 15 (helping them through their grief since ages 5 and 8), widow to Ryuta Sanui since 2018 and remarried and happily married wife to Dario Mercado since 2021. I have been navigating grief, navigating how to parent grief, and navigating how to integrate grief, hope, love, and faith into life as it just keeps on going! I have a background in competitive sports (soccer and basketball), living abroad in Japan as well as the other sunny state of Hawaii. I am a writer and grief advocate, but mostly, a teacher, a mom, a wife, and a Christian! Since becoming a widow and single mom in 2018, I have a passion within the church for widows, fellow grievers, and single parents. I was part of a special team of single parents in the church who in 2020 started to gather single moms and dads for events, in person and virtual, to discuss the specific faith needs within the single parent community. Although remarried, I have a personal ministry for widows, advocating for the “gleaners”, the other grievers out there, and those who operate on the “margins.”
My intention for this blog/website is that it can be a gathering place for grief resources, a gathering place for community with other grievers and grief advocates, and a place to share memories and lessons. I hope that this will be a place that is not only part of my own process of grieving and healing, but that it could be something useful to someone else. I have had different people approach me over the years since my late husband Ryuta passed away asking me, “How can I help my friend? Their husband just died.” Since the sudden death of my late husband, I have spent the last 6 years searching for and devouring whatever information I could find that could help me make some sense of this grief experience. I am hoping that Mpathway can be a place to gather and organize what I’ve found and that it could be a “one stop shop” for all things grief. Whether through blog posts, articles, books, podcasts, songs, art, quotes, bible studies, community resources, I hope Mpathway creates a pathway for you to understand your own grief experience better, too.
Welcome to Mpathway.
